Recorded Octo­ber 9, 2004
REALAUDIO

This pro­gram presents John Buchanan, the jour­nal­ist who uncov­ered recent infor­ma­tion adding to the grow­ing body of knowl­edge about the Bush family’s involve­ment with Nazi indus­try. In addi­tion to dis­cus­sion of Prescott Bush’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in the Nazi flight cap­i­tal pro­gram that moved the Third Reich’s funds out of Europe and into neu­tral coun­tries after World War II, the pro­gram sets forth John Buchanan’s har­row­ing expe­ri­ence at the hands of venge­ful gov­ern­ment offi­cials look­ing to pun­ish him for his efforts. Another impor­tant dis­cov­ery con­cerns John’s uncov­er­ing of the fact that Prescott Bush, Sr. was an early financier of the Lib­erty League, a domes­tic fas­cist orga­ni­za­tion that plot­ted to over­throw Pres­i­dent Roo­sevelt in 1934.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Descrip­tion of the estab­lish­ment by lis­ten­ers to this pro­gram of a web­site that fea­tures the declas­si­fied doc­u­ments about the Bush family’s involve­ment with Nazi indus­try; John’s dis­cus­sion of a law suit against the Bush fam­ily by two Auschwitz sur­vivors; fur­ther rev­e­la­tions con­cern­ing the Bush-connected Hamburg-Amerika line’s pro-Nazi activ­i­ties in the United States; a suc­cess­ful wager John under­took with The Guardian (a British paper) bet­ting that they could not impugn the authen­tic­ity of the doc­u­ments he had uncovered.

1. This inter­view high­lights John Buchanan’s polit­i­cal odyssey, under­taken to uncover the truth of the Bush family’s involve­ment with Nazi indus­try. In FTR#435, we exam­ined John’s mag­nif­i­cent arti­cles writ­ten for The New Hamp­shire Gazette about the Bush family’s Third Reich con­nec­tions. Most impor­tant of the rev­e­la­tions con­tained in Buchanan’s arti­cles is the dis­clo­sure that Prescott Bush (Sr.) con­tin­ued his involve­ment with the Nazi money machine after World War II. Specif­i­cally, he con­tin­ued to deal with indi­vid­u­als and insti­tu­tions that were mov­ing Nazi monies out of Ger­many and into neu­tral coun­tries between the years of 1945 and 1951. This places Bush squarely in the Bor­mann flight cap­i­tal milieu, about which we have spo­ken so often. (The text of the New Hamp­shire Gazette arti­cles is repro­duced in the descrip­tion for FTR#435. The declas­si­fied doc­u­ments them­selves are avail­able online.)

2. The sub­stance of the Bush family’s involve­ment with Nazi indus­try can be found in the broad­casts cited imme­di­ately above. Mr. Emory feels it would be point­less to restate the details, in that they have been pre­sented so often before. FTR#479 con­tains the most recent treat­ment of the sub­ject. This pro­gram will only high­light aspects of the research that have not been dis­cussed previously.

3. Among the points raised by Mr. Buchanan is the fact that after his arti­cles were printed in The New Hamp­shire Gazette, almost no news orga­ni­za­tions would fol­low up on the story. The Guardian engaged in a friendly wager with Mr. Buchanan, that no one could impugn the authen­tic­ity of the doc­u­ments he had uncov­ered. John notes that recently two Auschwitz sur­vivors have filed a $40 bil­lion suit against the Bush fam­ily because some of their invest­ments uti­lized slave labor. In par­tic­u­lar, Mr. Buchanan notes that the Bush fam­ily had some stock in the Con­sol­i­dated Sile­sian Steel Cor­po­ra­tion, which used slave labor at Auschwitz.

4. John relates how a group of lis­ten­ers in the Mid­west (high school stu­dents and their teacher) obtained copies of the doc­u­ments he had uncov­ered and put them on the web, with copy­righted intro­duc­tions that he had writ­ten. Mr. Emory notes that if teenagers can do some­thing this brave, heroic and impor­tant, adult lis­ten­ers should be able to do more.

5. Next, John presents a har­row­ing tale of some of the offi­cial ret­ri­bu­tion to which he was sub­jected because of his inves­ti­ga­tions. Detained by two peo­ple mis­rep­re­sent­ing them­selves as “Secret Ser­vice Agents,” John was told he was being inves­ti­gated for allegedly threat­en­ing the life of the Pres­i­dent of the United States. No con­crete proof was given (as he had done no such thing), but they nonethe­less demanded, and received, access to all of John’s per­sonal records and con­tacts. After that, he was detained in Florida and told he had threat­ened the life of some­one he had never met and whose name was not pre­sented to him. He was then told that his pub­lic defender had lost his file and that he was in deep trou­ble. He would prob­a­bly be con­victed, accord­ing to the legal author­i­ties. For­tu­nately, a bene­fac­tor came to his assis­tance and he was released and exonerated.

6. Mr. Buchanan then relates some infor­ma­tion that he had just gleaned from the files of the McCormack-Dickstein Com­mit­tee. In those files, he found that the Hamburg-Amerika Line, one of the most promi­nent of the Bush family’s Nazi busi­nesses, was financ­ing a Nazi news­pa­per in the United States and sup­port­ing the estab­lish­ment of a full-blown Nazi move­ment in this country.

7. Among the most sub­stan­tively inter­est­ing of John’s recent dis­cov­er­ies is the fact that Prescott Bush was an early financier of the Lib­erty League, a domes­tic fas­cist orga­ni­za­tion that was the pri­mary ele­ment in the 1934 fas­cist plot to over­throw Pres­i­dent Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

8. The pro­gram reviews a pas­sage from Mar­tin Bor­mann: Nazi in Exile about the Nazis’ prepa­ra­tions for their post­war under­ground revival.

“ . . . Dr. Scheid also affirmed, ‘The ground must now be laid on the finan­cial level for bor­row­ing con­sid­er­able sums from for­eign coun­tries after the war.’ As an exam­ple of the kind of sup­port that had been most use­ful to Ger­many in the past, Dr. Scheid cited the fact that ‘patents for stain­less steel belonged to the Chem­i­cal Foun­da­tion, Inc. New York, and the Krupp Com­pany of Ger­many, jointly, and that of the United States Steel Cor­po­ra­tion, Carnegie, Illi­nois, Amer­i­can Steel & Wire, National Tube, etc., were thereby under an oblig­a­tion to work with the Krupp con­cern.’ He also cited the Zeiss Com­pany, the Leica Com­pany, and the Hamburg-Amerika line as typ­i­cal firms that had been espe­cially effec­tive in pro­tect­ing Ger­man inter­ests abroad. He gave New York addresses to the twelve men.”

(Mar­tin Bor­mann: Nazi in Exile; Paul Man­ning; Copy­right 1981 [HC]; Lyle Stu­art Inc.; ISBN 0–8184-0309–8; p. 25.)